Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Justice

The United States is the only first-world, the one developed nation to use the death penalty.

Our inability to legislate crime properly has burdened the American taxpayer with an enormous tax bill to house our prisoners.

This financial strain on individual citizens, and the ridiculous expense of a privatized penal system, has created a fury against the prison class.

The prison class in the United States is, primarily, under-educated, under-privileged, poverty-stricken, non-white drug users.

The prisons are not full of the people destroying American homes, families, jobs, or the very fabric of decency. No! The prisons are over-flowing with drug addicts.

The generals who ensure that cocaine makes its way across the border while confirming that bananas and rubber is being stopped, are not in prison. Jeffrey Skilling, a man responsible for destroying the lives of millions, is not in prison. Owners of under-maintained mines, where workers suffer and die, are not imprisoned. Congressmen who break every law of ethics, aren't in prison. Some of these powerful men might spend a week, month or year at a federal detention center where they are protected by guards; but none of them are sent to hell-holes like Ossining, Cedar Junction, Starke, Rahway, San Quentin, or any of the thousands of state prisons funded by taxpayers. Places where brutal rape, assault and battery, extortion, and enslavement are ignored.

No, rich white guys who destroy America are never sent anywhere they might get hurt. In fact, most of them are free to continue running their business and develop their career while imprisoned.

A single mother of two who caries an ounce of cocaine from Jersey to Harlem, in hopes of earning an extra seventy-five bucks to maintain her household is serving life in one of these joints! A guy who robs an entire community of its pension money is slapped on the wrist.

America's sense of justice is so out-of-whack that we are totally unqualified to work for justice offshore. We actually are not only unqualified, we are unable to do it. Our justice policies and our foreign policies are so draconian and immoral that even when we want to help we are doomed to failure. Why? The people to whom we have abdicated our government since 1980 are interested only in using government policy for personal profiteering. Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II have now so deeply embedded a liberalized economy that we can't even have a conversation in the media about the ideas behind a liberalized economy and its impact on our moral fabric, lest we be called names.

We cannot get involved in a war without a profit motive, which makes it impossible for us to help those who most need our military intervention. Our only successful military actions of the last 25 years have been in conjunction with other nations under the auspices of the United Nations. Any other actions we have taken have been bared naked as immoral aggression against people unable to defend themselves against us: Panama, Grenada, Iraq. All unmitigated foolishness rooted in a need to control the flow of resources that are not rightfully ours.

When will the American people begin to speak-up about the disaster our nation has become?

Let's hope the election of a Democratic congress is the beginning of Americans really wanting change.

Let's see if Americans will vote third-party in two years when they realize that the Dems are no more capable of helping than the GOP.

Perhaps they will.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

DM,

I hate to quibble with you on this, because lord knows I agree with your post in toto, however...Japan still uses the death penalty.

DM said...

I always forget that Japan is a developed nation. They are so . . . uncivilized! Perfect allies for the USA!